Amelia Magica
With an unobtrusive creak the Doctor peeked his head out the crack in the door, confirming that he had, in fact, landed in the right place. The Pond house stood before him, although it seemed slightly overrun, as if there was no one inside, or they simply no longer cared enough to maintain the house.
The Doctor was puzzled by this; he had gotten the impression from Amelia the last time he was here that she would be living at the big house for several years yet.
She couldn't have moved out, he hadn't overshot by that much. Had he?
Ducking inside to check, he confirmed that no, he had landed in the right time period, it was impossible to get closer with the TARDIS still damaged from the crash and the energy surge that had brought him back last time.
Deciding that he had had enough of milling about aimlessly, the Doctor elected to go off and search for Amelia. Trying the door on the big house, he found it unlocked, putting him on edge. Inside, the house appeared to be deserted, as if the Ponds had left in a hurry.
As much as he enjoyed investigating however, the Doctor was worried about Amy and he needed to get to the bottom of this quickly, find out where she and her family had gone, which would be tough with the TARDIS and his gear damaged. Squinting one eye, he engaged his telepathy.
A wealth of emotions flowed across the mind of the Doctor: Laughter and happiness, love and hope, comfort and sadness. All of these were normal family emotions, a good sign, if a little faded. Perhaps the emotion that seemed to permeate the house.
Opening himself wider, scanning the base emotion, he found-
Grief, sadness, tears, loneliness, anger, hatred, resentment at nothing in particular but also everything at once. Misery, sadness, rage, loathing, loneliness, pain, unbelievable grief.
Pulling himself back, the Doctor found himself shaking. It was unthinkable that that level of pain could be felt by any sane human. As he recovered from the emotional shock, he noticed something with a shiver. There was a definite center to the emotion. Closing his eyes, it seemed to layer the floors and the walls with a thick carpet of darkness, engulfing the other emotions, leaving ultimately only the grief.
Turning onto the landing, he seemed to drop into a pit, with blackness as his surrounds, fought off in increasingly futile efforts by tiny sparks of iridescent pink light. Turning around, he looked for the darkest part of the black.
Opening his eyes, he found himself looking at an unadorned door, but it filled him with dread for a reason he couldn't quite put his finger on.
He opened the door and found… A girl's room. It was a functional girl's room, but the dust on the shelves and the cobwebs in the rafters indicated there had been no one here in some time. He saw a photo album laid out on the desk, layered with emotions. Turning it over, he found a picture of two teenagers eating ice cream on a bridge. One of them was definitely Amy, but he had no idea who the other one was however if the emotions on the picture were any indication, she had had some sort of impact on Amy.
Behind the photo album, at the back of the des, there was a folded note labeled: Amy
Turning it over carefully, he found a note scrawled messily on the back.
Amy, it began, if you've gotten this, then it means that you've finally come home. We're both so, so sorry that we couldn't stay in Leadenworth, but there were too many memories, of you running, jumping and climbing over every single thing in this entire town. There are things you might need in your old hiding spot; of course we knew where it was (Sorry). Please contact us, we left the details on the paper here. Please come back to us, we miss you.
The end of the letter was splotchy as if the writers, her parents he reflected, had started to cry as they wrote it, letting their emotions colour the page.
But that just brought more questions for the Doctor, which normally could fill him with child-like excitement, just made him uneasy: What had driven Amy to run away from home? Where was she now? And almost certainly the cause, in his mind; what was the cause of the miasma of grief that seemed to permeate the surroundings to a frightening degree?
Taking the picture in his pocket and slipping out of the grief-ridden pond house, the Doctor closed his eyes and –Success! The creature that had left the house this way had left a trail into the village.
Ducking quickly into the TARDIS before engaging its auto-repair function, the Doctor realized in a flash of morbidity, that he was excited. Despite himself, he was eager to solve the mystery, to find Amy, to ascertain the cause of her disappearance, and to learn.
That was at the forefront of his mind as he walked towards town, because in all his 900 years, he had never before encountered a creature that bled emotions in the same manner as this one. Were there others, or was this the last? Were there other types, of the other emotions? Where did they originate? How did they evolve?
His musings were interrupted however, by a small alien creature that had wandered into his path. Visually, it appeared to be some sort of cat/rabbit thing, but the clearly unnatural rings around its ears gave lie to that idea. Was this the creature responsible? No, on a close inspection, it gave off literally zero emotions. The red marking on its back seemed to give off some sort of energy, but it was of a type the Doctor was unfamiliar with, much to his chagrin.
Looking up at him with empty red eyes it spoke telepathically "Greetings, I detected a powerful psychic presence near the abandoned house, but I had to check. Please help me"
Taken aback by the sudden and telepathic nature of the communication, the Doctor paused before replying "Right, yes that psychic was me. Um, can you understand me?"
"Yes"
"Well, that's good, I just wasn't sure about your species. Which, before we go any further, and I am embarrassed by my having to ask, what are you?"
"Your surprise is understandable; we tend to keep to ourselves. I am an semi-artificial construct of the species known a the Incubators. I am a representative of my race to the people of Earth, who on occasion aid us with issues in return for experiences they would otherwise never had the chance to have. Unfortunately, very few humans have the capacity to see me, makings your capacity to do so something of an oddity, as in our experience, only females have ever possessed the correct energy to see me"
All of this was 'said' in a perfectly emotionless voice, unnerving the Doctor somewhat: the Daleks were largely artificial and they possessed more emotion, and even if it was just to scream, than the Incubator before him. It was often difficult to keep emotions out of one's voice, to keep it out of a telepathic voice required near god-like concentration. He filed that away for later.
"Well, I have to say, it's a pleasure to meet you, even if it is under such circumstances. You see, I'm tracking a strange creature that seems to bleed emotions into the surroundings and I have no idea where it is, I'm just following an old trail. I hate to be a bother, but I need to find it, it's taken a friend of mine"
The Incubator looked at him with its impossible-to-read face for a moment before replying "Are you referring to Amelia Pond?" The only way to know that it had asked a question was from the arrangement of words; they lacked any of the normal inflection one came to expect in conversation.
Excitement overruling caution, the Doctor replied "Yes, that's right. Do you know where the creature is? Or where it's taken Amy? Is it still nearby?"
"Do not worry; I know exactly what you are referring to. In answer to your question, it has lodged itself behind a psychic barrier I am incapable of affecting in the orchard nearby. It has resisted all attempts to remove it and has remained in its barrier for the past five years. It has become a source of much disruption in the town, though they cannot perceive it the same way they are unable to perceive me. Even the forces that I bring in have been incapable of dealing with it, a truly unprecedented situation. Perhaps you can help me"
Processing the information, the Doctor came to a swift conclusion "If this'll help Amy, then I'll help you stop this, whatever it is. I'm the Doctor"
"Hello Doctor. The forces have a habit of referring to the creature as a 'Witch'. I will lead you to its precise location, and tell you what I know. I am Kyuubey".
As they walked through the town (The Doctor walked, Kyuubey rode his shoulder), the Doctor was becoming more and more unnerved by what Kyuubey was telling him about the Witch. To be able to incite the humans to suicide by its mere presence was a horrible curse indeed. And if Kyuubey was to be believed, it was in agony for every moment of its life. Whatever situation had led to its evolution must have indeed been twisted.
The town itself was a ghost town. It looked as though it had once been a hive of activity, but was now almost totally deserted. This was what happened to a town when a Witch was allowed to stay. They bred astonishingly fast, and each had to be put down as rapidly as possible in order to prevent tragedies like this one from happening.
While the Doctor was ordinarily against the taking of life, the fact that these Witch's natural cycle resulted in the pointless loss of human life was prompting him to reevaluate that ideal, especially if it would be for –and he was loathe to use the term- the Greater Good.
"Seems an odd place for a witch to live, don't you think, an orchard?"
"From what we've found, each Witch chooses to place its barrier in either places where there is ordinarily much sadness, such as a hospital, or a retirement home. Alternatively, they have been known to base themselves in areas where the host felt great sadness."
"Host? What do you mean host?"
"Witches are born in one of two ways. They are either created when a Witch's familiar matures to a point where they become an independent Witch on their own, or when a human is overcome by a negative emotion when a Witch is or was in the area."
"So you're saying its possible that Amy may have been taken as one of these hosts?" asked the Doctor, his mind instantly leaping to the grim possibility that entailed.
"It is highly likely. However, as with everything, there is always the possibility that this is not the case. Even so, you should be prepared to act in a manner which you find repulsive if it becomes certain that Amy has been taken over by the Witch."
"There has to be another way!" exclaimed the Doctor "I won't just kill an innocent girl!"
"After what she has done Doctor, would she still be considered innocent? In your eyes? In her parents eyes? In her own eyes? Innocence is a highly subjective term; one person's innocent becoming another's war criminal, resulting in a twisting of perspectives across the stars. You strike me as a man of reason, whose own supposed 'innocence' has been tempered by experience. Would you really fall into such immature statements? Her actions, whether she was aware of them or not, have led to the deaths of dozens. Would you honestly forgive such a creature?"
Flabbergasted by Kyuubey's suppositions, the Doctor latched onto the one point he could; "You keep talking as though it's certain that she's been taken over by the Witch. Why? And while I'm at it; is it possible to remove a host from the Witch at this stage?" he asked, a nebulous plan taking shape in his head.
"I simply see no point in giving voice to speculations that are most likely incorrect. And in answer to your other question, it has never been done before, although a partial removal was once performed, there was not enough energy devoted to it to complete the regression to the human state. Do you intend to attempt such a thing? If you do, I would be pleased if you would alert me before you begin, as it would give invaluable data to my species."
"Oh, I'm sure I'll be able to surprise you. After all, I don't believe in no-win situations"
"An outlook I have come across before. It leads its proponents to suffering. We have arrived"
He had been drawn into his conversation with Kyuubey, and had completely ignored the town as he walked through it. Now he found himself in an apple orchard, where the scent of blossoms was fouled by the smell of rotting fruit and the distinctive tinge of a body that could never be entirely removed no matter what was used to clean it.
"There" indicated Kyuubey, pointing with one of his ears, "do you see the seal?"
The Doctor could see it. It was a rotating circular design that seemed reminiscent of a lightning bolt, where the ordinary colour spectra gave way to a crack in the world.
"Just focus your power on the seal. This is easiest if you can direct it through external means" but the Doctor wasn't listening, already focusing his prodigious telepathy on opening a way through the barrier composed of grief.
With a keening wail, the barrier parted with the right hand side swinging inwards onto a glowing portal. "I hope you are prepared. Step through quickly, it will move quickly to seal off its domain again." But his words were lost as the Doctor took them both through the portal, into the barrier.
It was, the Doctor decided, like nothing he had ever laid eyes on. Almost as if a children's book had been cut apart and laid across the landscape. But then when you went to touch it, you found that it was the landscape and had all the comfort of a block of concrete.
As the Doctor walked through, fiddling with his sonic-screwdriver, they came across a creature. It looked like an apple with a large tearstained eye on the front, two stubby arms being its method of locomotion. Presently, it held onto a sharpened paintbrush it had pulled out of a worm hole on the side of it, above its left shoulder.
It scratched something into a rock in a language the Doctor almost mistook for Galifreyan with its predominance of circles, but he dismissed the idea as he found he had no clue what it said. *Property of Ilsebil, mistress of the realm* (This bit was meant to be in the Witch's language, but it didn't show up).
"'Property of Ilsebil, mistress of the realm'" parroted Kyuubey from the Doctor's shoulder. "Don't worry," he continued appeasably, at the Doctor's look of puzzlement "I can only read it through experience with the language. There is simply no other way. Also, avoid the familiars as best you can, they are the Ilsebil's servants and they will not hesitate to harm you if you give them the chance. "
Passing more familiars, the Doctor came across a set of large murals, made out of some sort of mobile collage. It depicted a Japanese girl shunning a redheaded girl in order to be with a boy, and gradually ignoring the girl more and more. It came to a point where it was painfully clear that the redhead needed help, and the Japanese girl did try. But she no longer knew the girl the way she had and the redhead disappeared. It ended with the Japanese girl ultimately taking her own life out of grief beneath an apple tree.
The next one had a dark haired girl dressed in a whit coat. She spent a lot of time with her brother, but he was sad whenever he looked at the sky. So the girl spoke to something in the shadows. Then suddenly the brother was flying through the sky, a look of pure joy writ large across his face. The girl watched her brother with happiness in her eyes. Then the thing in the shadows called to her and gave her six spears and she went off. She met the redheaded girl and they became good friends. A letter came and she learnt her brother's plane had crashed. Leaving the redheads embrace; she went off to a church for the funeral and was never seen again. The redheaded girl cried and cried and cried.
The third showed a man climbing out of a hole in the garden. His coat and hair dripped starlight. His smile and the look in his eyes were infectious. Between his hands and from his tongue he spun a web of wonder that entranced the small child audience. She gives him an apple and he fixes her wall.
The Doctor's hand clenches around something in his pocket. The man leaves and the girl is sad. There is a long wait, a pile of old calendar pages. The man came back in his box and the redheaded girl flew to meet him. The two of them talked and then she showed the man a surprise; something he'd never seen before. The man is scared and runs away, leaving the girl standing there, unaware of the tears streaming down her face. Much, much later, the man arrives again and speaks to the shadows. The man, with the shadow now on his shoulder walked into a nest made of apples. And the rest was unfinished; one of the familiar creatures was still painting it, taking a look over its shoulder at the Doctor as he painted.
Pulling the object out of his pocket, the Doctor stared at the apple, the crude smiley face seeming to mock him behind its grin. He had quickly realized that the man in the mural was him, but the concrete reminder hurt in a way he had not expected. And the calendars; just how long had it been since he came here?
The pair passed further into the Witch's domain, more and more of the familiars looking at them over and around the cartoonish scenery. They came across another mural, a set this time, all of them framed by apple trees made of some unnatural sort of blue wood. The far end was almost entirely black, in stark contrast with the whiteness of the end the Doctor was observing.
It followed the redheaded girl, and it began when she woke up and met him in her garden. There was the same scene again, with him spinning magic in the night. There was the apple and there was the wall and then he was gone, carried off like a fleeting will 'o wisp. She waited all night for the man only for a tall woman to come out and tell her that she should come inside. The girl's life returned to normality. Then the Japanese girl comes in and becomes friends with the redhead. Eventually they take a trip to a foreign city, the way it must have looked from the plane laid out in excruciating detail.
Mitakihara, he realized. The girls played across the city and seemed to both light up slightly. The next scene has the two girls talking to the shadows the same way as the dark-haired girl in the earlier mural. It is unclear what happens next but the girl is standing there in that same costume and holding that gem that had unnerved the Doctor with its unfamiliar energies.
The next showed her waiting at home, before leaping out of the window (giving the Doctor quite a start) and flying down to meet him. The scene played out as it has in his version, although here once he left, everything in the scene turned a shade of grey. The next, a few days later, followed the girl as the little shadow led her around a corner and showed her heap. A heap of what was uncertain; it looked as though some giant hand had smeared something foul across to hide it. The next scenes are a blur, just a rush of running, schoolwork and collapsing into bed. There's a bright patch at what seems to be a birthday, then another black smear, bigger than the last.
The blur continued, individual figures becoming unrecognizable. Then out of nowhere came the dark-haired girl from the first mural and –the Doctor realized- the photo he had in his pocket. The meeting is punctuated by a drop of red on the redheaded girl. The two become fast friends as the Japanese girl, already a background figure, faded out almost completely to join with an unknown male silhouette. There is another blur, but this one seems to give off a sense of contentment. There is another birthday, with the Japanese girl coming forward once again but she cannot compete with the happy glow from the girls with red and dark coloured hair.
The blur carries on and on, the happiness retained from before. Then the dark haired girl gets the letter and pulls herself from the redhead.
She doesn't come back. The redhead goes off to look, finding nothing. Finally, she looks in the place she was avoiding, where the dark-haired girl went for the funeral. Then she is fighting; a gigantic… thing riding an antique biplane that looked to have been plucked straight out of the First World War.
Here the mural began to darken as it shows the redhead crying herself to sleep night after night, sobbing out her grief after losing her partner, lover, whatever they had been.
Next is the redheaded girl standing over a battered boy, him staring up at her through the black rings around his eyes. Adults come and abuse the girl, shouting her down or simply saying nothing at all. Then the Japanese girl is next to the redhead, but she shoves her off, full of spite and sadness. The shadows press in around everything. The girl is writing a letter, full of the last of her hope. It glows, driving off the shadows that lingered in every corner.
The final scene is of the girl, writing in some unknown book, hunched over a desk, gem on the surface. The Doctor is horrified to note that it has turned almost entirely black, seeming to swallow all light around it. Indeed, the girl sits in an island of light, cast out by the brave lamp, mercifully oblivious of the emotions around it. The girl stands, stealing one last glance at a page in an album. The Doctor realizes that she is looking at the same picture in his pocket. She takes her gem, the blackness following, clawing greedily at her ankles as she walks. It is apparent that she either doesn't notice or care about the tears streaming down her face.
Now she is under a tree, painted in blacks, and is planting a seed made of metal into the ground.
The Doctor reaches up, and wipes away the tears he was unaware he'd shed. Kyuubey looks at the Doctor with a look that might be anticipation, it's impossible to tell anything with that face. Steeling his resolve, the Doctor carries the two of them into the Witch's den, an army of familiars watching them silently pass, not one of them making a sound.
The first thought that the Doctor had upon entering the sanctum was 'Garden', or to be more precise; 'Vegetable Garden'. There were vegetables of all types and sizes littering the area, arranged in an apparently careless manner around a central lamp.
"She is in there, Doctor, be prepared for it is almost certain that she will not remember you" The Doctor's hand tightened around his sonic screwdriver. He would only get the one chance.
Approaching the patch, the light in the center came to life, casting an ethereal glow over the garden, before rocketing into the sky. The Doctor gaped at what it pulled out of the ground, for it resembled a twisted version of his own TARDIS. If he had been asked what was wrong with it, he wouldn't have known, save to say 'it just wasn't right'
With a creak that was more of a roar, the doors facing them opened to reveal the biggest apple the Doctor had ever seen. It was easily the size of a small car and balanced precariously on top of an oak tree with two long branches, similar in placement to arms.
As the Doctor looked around for the Witch, the apple turned to face him, revealing a monstrous bloodshot eye. It stared at him, pupil dilating frantically, and the Doctor almost swore that he heard the sound of tears.
Kyuubey hopped off his shoulder and the crying stopped, the mad eye flickering between the two "You said you would help, so help. This is the Witch Ilsebil, she must be destr-"He was cut off as the Witch slammed one of her 'arms' into the space where Kyuubey had been an instant before. The sobbing had been replaced with screams of fury that seemed to rend the air apart and sent a trail of blood trickling out of the Doctor's nose.
Eternally grateful to Kyuubey's distraction, the Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver, making the adjustments he estimated he would need.
Anyone who'd travelled with the Doctor would swear blind that his most useful gadget was the sonic screwdriver. In truth however, this was only because he had modified it so extensively. Signal boosters, hyper efficient capacitors and other assorted gadgets filled the thing. But one of the few he never mentioned, or used, was the psychic resonator. It was a self imposed taboo due to its capacity as a weapon. Tuned to the right frequency, it could paralyze, or even kill, races with developed psychic abilities.
He had never used it. He prayed it would be enough.
He raised it up, opened the emitters and adjusted the frequency so that it matched the pulses in his head.
Engage.
The Witch stopped moving instantly. She quivered, and then shrieked, throwing her arms into the air. Familiars that had gathered around their queen began to twitch and claw at themselves from the feedback. The Doctor was forced to one knee, but kept his finger down.
Ilsebil's shrieks continued, black veins came to the surface of her body and split open, leaking ichor among the vegetables, all rotten. The vegetables crumbled into dust that stank of brimstone, the familiars bursting completely, spraying the acrid smell of blood across the chamber. The mad eye of the apple cried dark tears and burst blood vessels stained the whiteness black as pitch.
The apple fell, shaking the ground and crushing the familiars that had tried to catch the crown of their mistress. It split apart and maggots flowed out, before they too, crumbled to dust, unable to stand before the unprecedented assault of the Doctor. The leaves at the ends of the Witch's arms browned and crumbled away. The blue box exploded outwards, tearing off portions of the Witch that bled the same dark ichor of the Witch's blood.
The screwdriver was beginning to burn the Doctor's hand and his vision had started to tunnel. He held on for all he was worth.
Still shrieking in pain, the Witch wrapped her arms around herself, trying to force closed a crack that had begun to form. Swarms of bloated insects pulled themselves out of the dirt and began to feast on the rotten wood, before crumbling as well. The arms fell and the tree split in half, revealing a figure in the center.
It was Amy, head thrown back as she continued to shriek. Her skin was pale and her hair was long and matted. Tears of blood flowed freely down her face from eyes that eerily mirrored the Witch's. A web of twisted gunmetal flowed out of the earth and into a tiny cage structure on her hip. A final tendril tore itself free and flowed into her body.
As soon as it had, she fell silent and dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She fell to the hard ground and lay still in a pool of blood and ash.
The Doctor groaned and dropped the screwdriver into a puddle of blood. It started to steam. The fumes coming from the puddle pushed him over the tipping point and he fell into unconsciousness, his last thought after looking at the flesh of his hand healing was 'Thank Hope I'm still regenerating', and he tipped, undignified, into the puddle and lay there as his body began to pull itself back together.
Save for the drip drip of blood, the dissolving barrier was silent as the grave as it gently deposited the companions asleep on the grass beneath the apple tree.
A.N.: I had originally intended to finish the story here, but there just never seemed to be a good place to break it off. Please review, tell me what you think.
On an unrelated note, how do the Doctor parts seem? Because he is very difficult to write from if I'm honest.
On another unrelated note, you get an internet cookie if you know who performed the incomplete de-witchification.